Speech must remain free in a democracy

ARTHUR Terminiello was a contemptible bastard. In 1946 the suspended Catholic priest gave a speech to about 1000 people in Chicago, denouncing Jews, among others, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM

ARTHUR Terminiello was a contemptible bastard. In 1946 the suspended Catholic priest gave a speech to about 1000 people in Chicago, denouncing Jews, among others.

As some among the crowd inside yelled “kill the Jews”, a larger crowd of protesters outside smashed windows and threw stink bombs. Terminiello was later fined $100 for a breach of the peace, a decision he fought all the way to the United States’ highest court. In a narrow 5-4

decision, the US Supreme Court found Terminiello’s conviction and fine were invalid, ruling the First Amendment right to free speech outweighed the potential consequences that speech could have.

The Australian’s late cartoonist Bill Leak.

It’s an interesting case in light of recent debates here over the limits of free speech. At a Federal level, the Commonwealth Government walked away from plans to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the wake of strident progressive opposition.

The section came under the spotlight in 2016 after The Australian’s late cartoonist Bill Leak’s was taken to the Australian Human Rights Commission over his depiction of an Aboriginal father who didn’t know the name of his delinquent son.

The case against Leak was eventually dropped, but his family maintains the stress of fighting the charge contributed to the death of the man who had won seven Walkley Awards for (often progressive) work published over more than three decades.

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Here in the NT, the Government is still pursuing an overhaul of the Anti-Discrimination Act that would make it unlawful to “offend or insult” someone on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, religion or disability status.

The proposed changes have worried some, including legendary NT News cartoonist Colin

Wicking, that their work could be soon be subjected to the red pen of a Government-appointed censor.

The case against these laws is often poorly argued. Former Attorney-General George Brandis did the cause more harm than good with his clumsy remark that “people have the right to be bigots”.

Darwin based cartoonist Colin Wicking. Picture: Justin Kennedy

What’s at stake here is far more important than anyone’s right to be a bigot.

It’s articulated brilliantly by the late American journalist Izzy Stone in a column he wrote more than 70 years ago, defending the Supreme Court’s majority decision in the Terminiello case.

Stone describes himself as the “atheistic, communistic, zionistic Jew” who had been the target of Teminiello’s rage during his Chicago address. Yet he still defends the importance of Terminiello’s right to free speech.

“I learned in Israel what men here once learned at Lexington – not to scare easily,” Stone wrote in 1949.

“If there is a growth of unemployment and mass misery, it will be exploited by the Right as well as the Left, and anti-Semitism will grow like any other fungus on the muck of despair.

This gutter paranoia can only be prevented by fighting the conditions in which it can breed, and for that fight we need more and not less freedom of discussion, even though it be at the price of a few Terminiellos.”

Or even a few Trumps, if you want to use a modern-day example. Although Terminiello’s case proves the events at the Capitol in January were far from unprecedented.

The important point — which Stone articulates far better than this column ever could — is the danger presented when you allow a Government to have control over what people can and can’t say.

“Almost every generation in American history has had to face what appeared to be a menace of so frightening an order as to justify the limitation of basic liberties – the Francophiles in the days of the Alien and Sedition Laws, the abolitionists, the anarchists, the Socialists in the days of Debs; fascists, anti-Semites, and Communists in our own time,” Stone writes.

“Each for various people seemed to provide compelling arguments for suppression, but we managed to get through before and will, I hope, again without abandoning basic freedoms. To do so would be to create for ourselves the very conditions we fear.”

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These are thoughts worth considering in an age of cancel culture, where an angry Twitter mob is ready to denounce, shame and ultimately silence anyone who dares venture into wrongthink.

The NT Government, meanwhile, could do worse than to read Stone’s assessment of the Terminiello case before embarking on its own attempts to stifle free speech.